Fat Angie (22 page)

Angie enclosed the letter to her sister in a six-by-nine envelope. Peeling off a preprinted label with her sister’s last known mailing address, she centered it with care. It was absolutely perfect.

“Angie, you all right?” called Coach Laden from the front of the bus.

“Yeah.”

“Going to lock you up in here,” said Coach Laden.

Angie dragged her tired legs down the aisle.

“Good game,” said Coach Laden. “See you Monday.”

Angie stepped off the bus. No Wang. Just Jake. Jake without Ryan.

She swung her duffel over her shoulder. “ Hey,” she said to Jake.

Angie speed-dialed Wang’s cell. Voice mail. “Hey, where are you?” she asked.

“That was some shot,” Jake said.

“Wasn’t too bad, huh?”

“No, you definitely rocked the board.” Jake jammed his hands in his hoodie.

“Thanks. I mean, really . . . thanks,” Angie said.

Jake nodded.

“So, Wang was supposed to give me a ride,” Angie said. “Though I shouldn’t be surprised he bailed.”

“Yeah, he got hung up,” Jake said. “Kicked me a text to give you a lift.”

“He’s probably engaged in the criminal element, as my mom says.”

Jake blew on his hands. “C’mon. I’m freezing.”

The ride from the high school toward Oaklawn Ends was a short one, but long enough for Angie to pop off half a dozen texts to KC with no reply.

When they turned into the cul-de-sac of Oaklawn Ends, Angie’s couldn’t-be-bothered mother stood at the curb of their driveway. She seemed unusually bothered. Angie’s pulse elevated. Her palms sweated. Something was . . . off.

“Jake?” said Angie.

He could not look at her.

Angie popped the pimp silver door handle and stepped out. Jake pulled in to his driveway. Ryan blazed through the open back gate.

Ryan was a good dog.

Jake was a good boy.

“What’s . . . going on?” said Angie to her mother. She saw Wang in his second-story bedroom window.

He had been crying. He was crying. Wang showed no signs of crying on average and that was a fact that troubled Angie.

“Your dad —”

“Something’s wrong with Dad?”

“He’s on the way,” finished her mother.

“Wh — wh — why?”

Then it happened. The silence.

It took only a moment for Angie to realize. In a film, the camera would have circled around her.

Again and again and again.

Fat Angie dropped her duffel bag and tore the poorly stitched zipper apart.

Her mother, ill equipped for such an outburst, knelt. “What are you doing? Come inside.”

Fat Angie ripped into her bag and tossed clothes onto the driveway. She raced to their mailbox with her sister’s letter, threw it inside, and lifted the red flag. Her sore hands shook as she gripped the mailbox.

The box was cold.

“Angie,” said her mother.

“One, two, three, four, five, six . . .”

“Stop it,” said her mother.

Angie looked up to Wang’s second-story bedroom window again.

Wang was crying. He was crying a lot.

“Ten, eleven, twelve . . .” The numbers were difficult to form. Her concentration shattered.

Her mother grabbed Angie’s shoulders and the sweaty teen twisted, screamed. Her grip on reality had wavered. Angie clawed the envelope out of the mailbox and shouted at her mother, “One, two, three, four, five!”

Angie backed away, seeing Jake and his good dog Ryan sitting on the curb.

Jake was crying.

Ryan sat on his haunches.

Neighbors emerged from their doors. The sounds of news reports seeped from their flat-screen, surround-sound televisions.

“Angie, stop,” her mother said.

It was all so loud. Too loud. Angie squinted at the overcast sky. A helicopter flew overhead. Angie screamed again. And again.

Jake stood.

Ryan stood.

“It’s not like we didn’t know she wasn’t coming back,” her mother said, trying to hold her daughter. “Angie, it’s OK. You can be OK.”

Her mother’s voice had quivered only for a moment. It wasn’t enough for Angie.

The blades of the helicopter ricocheted in Angie’s ears.

Wang was crying. A lot.

Ryan barked at the helicopter as it passed.

Jake moved toward Angie.

“You
can
be OK,” pleaded her mother.

Screaming her numbers, Angie sprinted at top speed down the street. Neighbors looked on, barely pretending not to.

“Angie!” shouted her mother.

Angie’s counting echoed as she cut out the entrance to Oaklawn Ends. The trucks with satellites . . . the bloggers . . . the photographers . . . they would all return. It would be of interest to the whole world. They would want the skinny — the scoop. The everything.

She ran faster.

Harder.

Her breath was shallow. Her chest hurt.

They would ask their stupid questions. The country would mourn. The president would call, again. What could
he
know? What could
anyone
really know? They were watching. Just watching.

Eighteen minutes and twenty-two seconds later, Angie raced up KC’s lawn. She pounded on the door.

“Three hundred and four, three hundred and five . . .”

She pounded on the door harder.

“Three hundred and twelve, three hundred and thirteen . . .”

She stepped over Esther’s recently cut-back bush and around the side of the house to KC’s bedroom window.

“Three hundred and eighteen, three hundred and nineteen . . .” Angie’s knuckles rhythmically drummed the window.

She heard the muted sounds of an undetermined genre of music as she picked up a rock and slammed it through the window. Still counting, fumbling to twist the lock, she cut her arm in several not-so-critical areas. Angie opened the window and flopped in, a piece of glass jamming in her thigh. She did not notice the glass, as her attention was still focused on counting and moving toward the source of the ever-swelling music behind KC’s bathroom door.

“Three hundred and —” Angie swung the bathroom door open.

Angie stood still.

The numbers stopped.

Angie’s eyes went from a bloody handprint on the floor to KC’s beautiful brown eyes, which had seemed to go black. KC kicked the boom box off the tub ledge. The CD skipped before it crashed onto the floor. Electric sparks ignited.

KC’s forearms — her beautiful shoulders.

Blood.

Dripping.

Blood.

So many . . . cuts.

“Get out!” KC said.

Angie could not shake off the — the everything. Her shoulders tensed. Her throat tensed.

“Um . . . she . . . um —”

“I don’t want you here,
Fat Angie
!”

Angie shivered. The words
Fat Angie
had never, ever leaped from the sweet luscious lips of KC Romance. The grief-stricken Angie could not rationalize the behavior. No set of equations came to mind. She was not prepared for such cruelty.

Angie did not scream.

She did not cry.

She did not even count.

Simply, her fists unclenched. The letter to her sister only whispered as it hit the bathroom floor.

“KC,” called Esther. “Your dad’s — KC!”

Esther pushed past Angie.

“No baby, no,” said Esther.

“Get out, Esther,” KC said. “Get out!”

“Not gonna happen, kid.” Esther dampened a washcloth. “Angie, honey —”

Sobbing, KC kicked the wastebasket. “I have to cut it out!”

“Shh,” Esther said, her voice soothing and safe. “What do you have to get out, baby?”

“He hates me! Dad hates me, Esther,” KC said. “He told me he wasn’t coming around if I was gonna
play
gay. Play?”

Esther tapped the washcloth against KC’s cuts. “He’s just a son of a bitch sometimes. I’m sorry, baby.”

It was not safe here,
Angie thought. Not at KC’s.

Angie stepped back from the doorway, her shaky steps disconnected from herself. Glass crackled beneath her sneakers. The sound shredded her ears.

“Angie?” called Esther from the bathroom.

Angie walked at a vigorous pace out of KC’s room.

“Hey, Angie,” said Mike. “Angie?”

She swung open the front door and burst off the porch. Running. Chafing the inside of her thighs. She felt nothing.

The details as to Angie’s whereabouts from A to B were hazy. In this instance, A being KC’s home and B being the Five ’N’ Go.

The bell dinged above the door as she entered the four-aisle establishment that was under new ownership and being renovated. As if on autopilot, she marched to the Swiss Rolls. She gathered them in her bloody arms and then turned to Sno Balls, M&M’s, and whatever assortment of sugary substances caught her eye. Fat Angie approached the counter. A few items dropped from the heaping mountain of junk food.

A skater dude behind the counter gaped at the stockpile of junk food. Clearly he was in the midst of a Mary Jane high, as could be assessed by his glassy eyes.

“Hey,” he said. “You know your leg’s bleeding.”

She looked down. In fact, it was.

“OK, so, you wanna add a Super Slam Soda Slush for eighty-five cents?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Just this.”

“It’s really good. I had one and you can suicide it with —”

“No!” she said. “Just this.”

He sniffed, scratching the top of his greasy head.

“OK, whatever,” he said as her eyes filled with hate — with anger — with hunger.

“Nineteen eighty-four,” he said.

The number lingered in her head.

She dug into her moist tube sock and flicked a smelly wet twenty at him. She hauled the bag off the counter.

“You want your change?” he asked.

She pushed the door open. The bell dinged.

“Have a nice day,” said the skater dude behind the counter.

She stared at him.

“What?” he asked.

She pushed out the door as a car ripped into the parking lot. Music blaring with a garage band hoping to sound like the Smashing Pumpkins song “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”:

With the Five ’N’ Go door still ajar, the punk-Goth-Amish kid in the midst of extreme Rumspringa popped out the driver’s side. His engine still running.

“Your leg’s, like, bleeding,” he said, nonchalant.

She looked down. In fact, it still was.

She nodded.

He shrugged and dipped inside. The music seemed to chase her as she marched on the spit-out-gum-and-stamped-out-cigarette-covered sidewalk to the back of the Five ’N’ Go.

She hunkered beside a stack of pallets.

She tore at the Swiss Roll package with her perfectly straight teeth.

As if famished, she jammed the rolls into her plump cheeks. A wave of panic swam from her gut to her heart. Ripping at package after package, she stuffed one Little Debbie after another into her body. Tears streamed down her face. She sobbed, face full of Little Debbie’s sweet Swiss Rolls.

Fat Angie beat her temples with her palms. Harder and harder. Threw her elbows into the concrete store wall. Then leaned forward and upchucked.

It didn’t look at all like a Swiss Roll.

Shaking, she curled up on the greasy ground and pulled off her sweatshirt. Her chin doubled as she stared down at the
HORNETS’ NEST
T-shirt.

Her sister would never know of Fat Angie’s triumph of good over evil. She would never know about KC Romance. She would never know how utterly lonely Angie’s world was without her sister.

These facts were unbearable.

The gusty wind blew Angie’s hair straight back. She dragged her feet down Oaklawn Ends’ dead-end street. The press was packed in all along the cul-de-sac. Jake and Ryan cut through the crowd and jogged toward Angie.

“Hey,” Jake said. “Your leg’s bleeding.”

She nodded, stoic, and sat on a curb.

Jake sat beside her.

“I don’t think your mom meant to hurt you,” Jake said.

Angie leaned her head against Jake’s shoulder. Expensive cologne emanated from his gray name-brand hoodie.

“My sister’s not coming home, Jake,” Angie said.

Jake leaned his head on her head and Ryan sat in front of them. As a storm approached, the three of them waited. For whatever was next.